In this week's column, Under Gmail's hood, I mention Johnvey Hwang's nod to Oddpost as a Gmail forerunner. I left out part of the story because, well, I'd forgotten -- it's been a while. But a pair of excellent postings from Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah, a Lotus/IBM developer, refreshed my memory. Almost five years ago, a company called Halfbrain (which was acquired by Alphablox, which was acquired by IBM) made DHTML do things nobody thought it could -- like implement a spreadsheet, for example. As Ofoso-Amaah notes, some of that DNA found its way into Oddpost/Yahoo. And some of it found its way into IBM's WebSphere Portal. Thanks, Koranteng, for setting the record straight. And please do keep blogging! I would love to hear more IBM voices.
Scanning my archives, I see that I did mention Halfbrain in a column way back in March 2000. The questions I asked then still seem fresh today:
We keep circling around these issues. Some days, I can convince myself we're coming in for a landing.
Will webtop applications like BrainMatter become popular in ways that Java applets never did?
Can Mozilla's enhanced DOM make DHTML more of a "write-once, run-anywhere" proposition than it has previously been?
Will the most useful DHTML constructs, such as menus and trees, coalesce into standard, next-generation HTML tags?
If DHTML doesn't converge on a strong standard, is there still an opportunity for client-side Java?
Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2004/10/27.html#a1103